When Rovio announced plans to release an Angry Birds karting game called Angry Birds Go! it raised eyebrows for two reasons.

First: the risks in taking a franchise so seemingly tied to a specific genre (2D physics-based aiming’n'shooting) and daring to enter a genre dominated by the Mario Kart games, and the memory of countless character-based karting titles that didn’t match up.

Second: the even bigger risks of turning Angry Birds into a fully free-to-play game, making its money from in-app purchases and ads rather than paid downloads.

Free-to-play is problematic for Rovio, partly because of its generous approach to updates for previous Angry Birds titles and partly because of the large number of children who play the Angry Birds games.

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On either front, if Angry Birds Go’s in-app purchase prodding is too aggressive it’ll spark a big backlash. The game is out today for iOS, Android, Windows Phone and BlackBerry 10 – one of the first games to hit all four platforms on its launch day – so how has Rovio done? Pretty well on all counts.

I’ve loved numerous iterations of Mario Kart, and laughed at some of the rivals that copied its basic features while missing the nuances that made Nintendo’s series so great. I fired up Angry Birds Go! preparing for disappointment, but very quickly realised that it’s a really enjoyable game.

Different to Mario Kart, it’s fair to say: the power-ups system is simpler, with each character having a single, unique power-up to trigger a set number of times during races, rather than picking up different ones on the track. More emphasis on jumps too, perhaps unsurprisingly given Angry Birds’ roots.

The handling feels great, with a choice of touch or tilt. As in most touchscreen driving games, tilt is more fun, but touch is better for actually controlling your vehicle. The way the various karts turn, fly through the air and smash into one another feels very good.

Angry Birds touches include the characters, obviously – yes, no legs or hands, so heaven knows how they steer – and the way races start by you pulling back the car in a sling and letting go at the right moment. The different birds’ power-ups are standard for the genre: a mixture of weapons and speed-ups.

The game’s two main courses – Seedway and Rocky Road – each offer five types of race. Race is a straight race with several birds; Time Boom is a solo challenge to reach the finish before a fuse burns down; Versus is a one-on-one race, and Fruit Splat is a (possibly Fruit Ninja-inspired) mode where you have to drive through a set number of fruit on your way to the finish line.

Each section also includes boss-bird races: beat them three times, and you unlock them to use as a playable character. And as you work through, there are more modes to unlock too: one focused on stunts and another on jump-heavy ‘air’ races, for example, and a Jenga mode unlocked either by entering a code found on the Angry Birds Jenga board game, or with a $2.44 in-app purchase.

Jenga mode sees you slinging your car down a ramp to smash into blocks and dislodge pigs – perhaps a teaser for a future move of the original Angry Birds gameplay into 3D.

This isn’t the only way toys filter into the game. As with Angry Birds Star Wars II, Rovio has teamed up with Hasbro to launch a line of Telepods toys: models of the karts and their characters which can be bought for between $9 and $65, with varying accessories.

They’re nice toys in their own right, but the karts can then be scanned in to the game by putting them on their transparent stands and placing them over your device’s camera. It’s an alternative to the in-app purchases: good for collectors, but also potentially for parents who’d rather buy physical karts than let their kids loose with their iTunes accounts.

How about the free-to-play aspect then? Good with a few niggles. The use of timers – individual bird characters get tired after five races and have to ‘rest’ unless you revive them with one of the in-game currencies, gems. Not a huge problem once you’ve unlocked a few, but frustrating in the early stages.

The other in-game currency is coins, which you earn during races, and spend on upgrading the various karts’ speed, acceleration, handling and strength attributes. Impatient players can spend gems to get more coins – note to parents, you really need to set your in-app purchase restrictions and a secure App Store password.

In a week of playing review code of the game, I’ve not come to the kind of crashing “pay now or you’re stuck” halt I’ve seen in some free-to-play games: Rovio has clearly thought carefully about how aggressively it integrates in-app purchases into Angry Birds Go’s gameplay progression.

Not quite as good is the in-game store to buy new karts. Some can be bought with gems, with the amount clearly displayed underneath. Others simply have a Buy button which only when you’ve tapped it and entered your App Store password do you see how much it costs in a “Confirm your In-App Purchase” pop-up.

Showing the prices in the store would be better: they range from $3.26 to $57.30 at the time of writing, although this is where the Telepods feature kicks in for players who already own the specific toy for the kart they’d like to unlock.

All of this may evolve over time, as it has done for other free-to-play games. Taken on its gameplay alone, though, Angry Birds Go! is a good start. Another obvious addition – and I’d be surprised if this doesn’t come sometime in 2014 – is online and local multiplayer. The game tracks your scores against Facebook friends, but doesn’t yet let you race real people.

Angry Birds Go! obviously isn’t a Mario Kart killer, given that the games exist on completely different devices. The wider threat of a growing number of children spending their gaming time with Angry Birds rather than Mario, Pokemon, Link and co is a separate (and often heated) discussion, but for now the two karting games aren’t going head-to-head.

Angry Birds Go! is great fun now, with plenty of potential for evolution in 2014 and beyond. A few tweaks to the in-app purchases aside, it’ll be raising eyebrows for positive, not negative reasons.